from the legal pad

the achiever must do well. late nights, long mornings. entire days spent in hustle. complete tunnel vision. ambitious to learn, or fear of failure? probably.

i have a dream- an awake dream.  i have it most mornings as i back out of my parking space and head off.  in this vision, i knock into the car behind me that belongs to one of my many neighbors.  what follows in the dream, is a linear sequence of events in which my relationship with my neighbor self destructs.  i  move, and he in turn unfriends me on facebook. today, i find myself in closer proximity to children than previous life stages. somewhat naturally right? well, one thing that i am beginning to notice, is how creative these little collections of cells are.  they seem to always dream-awake.  the intuition of my two year old nephew regularly exceeds my rational expectations for him.  his energy rivals chernobyl.  his playfulness- instinctual. mlk jr had a dream- an awake dream.  he may or may not have worded it that way.  part of what separates his dream from mine is not only liberation, but imagination.  he named the darkness in a sea of seeming white.  it was child-like cre

as a kid, i remember running around our 2 acre yard with sticks, building forts and throwing rocks.  my brothers and i would ride down our drive way in a make shift box car (which was really the cart we used for our trash cans).  i remember being dirty and hot. lately, i've been finishing my runs by jumping into the apartment pool- i know it's gross.  recently, i climbed out of the pool and caught a glimpse of the treadmill just inside the fitness center. when i was in seminary, my more enlightening moments were actually on craig's front porch.  sitting in a wooden chair that leaned too far back, we (a relatively exclusive hodgepodge of hippies) watched the local fanfare roll by.  here, i learned to do all things you're supposed to do in seminary- an education indeed. my "american dream" is to have a wooden back porch, not a picket fence. maybe you design web programs that make the world go-round.  maybe you're an artist.  maybe you have severe all

on the way there,    i'm anxious,    i'm hungry. on my way there for the first time,    i'm intrigued as my mind fills in the blanks. but on the way back    on the way home again       i count fewer houses       i notice less.    i inhale, or exhale, whichever. and so if i work- hard, yet slow.    the distance will remain,    drive-time cannot diminish. but the way will become familiar.

my wife and i just moved from waco, texas to richmond, virginia. we drove- two vehicles, she in her car, and i in the rental moving truck. currently an excessive selection of memoirs and such from road trips offer fantastic reflections of what it's like to hit the open road in some capacity.  further, much of the music that i consider great, was likely written and refined on the road.  personally, i often find myself thinking about the interconnectedness of roads, highways, interstates, driveways and even sidewalks- not in a religious tone, but in a structural sense.  that's a huge construction.  its hard for me to imagine a larger, more expansive project... instead of a poem from the trek, id like to make a confession.  "i could be a trucker." the thickness of my beard, lacking;  my rough-neck attitude, sub-par;  my bladder, shallow.  many of my long-haul trucker archetypes do not align with the profession.  but there is something sexy about the tv show ice r